1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a display control apparatus and a display control method, and in particular, relates to a display control apparatus and a display control method for displaying a still image and a moving image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, there has been on the market a recording and reproducing device such as an electronic camera which records and reproduces a still image and a moving image with a memory card having a solid storage device as a recording medium. Among these devices, there have been available those including an electronic finder using a display unit such as a color liquid crystal panel.
In the electronic camera including the electronic finder, since an image before photographing is continuously displayed in the electronic finder, it is possible for a user of the electronic camera to decide an image composition. Further, since the captured image can be played back and displayed in the display unit of the electronic finder, it is possible to confirm the captured image.
As the performance of the electronic camera improves, particularly along with the increase in the number of pixels of an image sensor, a data amount employed for each captured image has been increased. Against such a background, a memory card having a large capacity has been developed, and depending on photographing conditions, it has become possible to store a large amount of images exceeding a thousand sheets in a portion of memory card.
Although the number of images recorded in the memory card is so large, it is possible for the user to see all the recorded images using a reproducing function of the electronic camera. However, when the number of sheets becomes so large to the extent of several hundreds, the time and trouble for finding out the image which the user desires to see also becomes great.
In order to solve such a problem, there have been proposed reproducing methods for finding a desired image from a large amount of captured images at high speed. For example, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 11-177911 discloses a digital camera having a function to perform a page advancing at high speed in displaying the captured image. This digital camera monitors whether or not the page advancing is a continuous page advancing operation. In a case of the continuous page advancing operation, a state of the operation is divided into several stages, and the content to be displayed for each stage is changed according to the state. This makes it easy for a user to visibly grasp the display content even during the continuous page advancing.
Further, Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2003-224752 discloses a digital camera having a continuous shooting function in which the captured images can be reproduced at the time intervals at which the photographing was performed.
However, basically the high speed page advancing is only a function to achieve the speedup in reproducing the captured image one by one in order at a constant speed, and fundamentally it is not different from the conventional method. Further, there is a method of displaying plural images within a single screen. However, it does not always have good usability since displayed information for each image becomes limited.